5/14/2009 @ 5:25PM

Google: 'We're Very Sorry'

The Internet giant, which saw its services slow to a crawl or temporarily stop Thursday, said an error in one of its systems routed its traffic through Asia, which overloaded servers, slowed their response time or took them out all together.
Google
, which operates more than 30 data centers worldwide, has only three data centers in Asia.

Google isn’t yet calling it a service “outage.” Instead, on its Apps Status page, the company suggests it was “a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users.” A footnote acknowledges that the problem may also be affecting other services, which seems to be the case. Google AdSense, Analytics, Docs, Maps and other services were all reported to be down at one point or another.

An official blog post by Urs Hoelzle, a Google operational executive, suggests the outage affected about 14% of Google users. “We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and ‘always on,’ so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens,” he wrote. “We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again.”

The executive explained Google’s error as a traffic jam, using a metaphor that likened Google to air traffic control. “Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia,” he wrote. “And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected.”

It’s still unclear where the service disruption lands Google with its users. Real-time opinion from sites like Twitter suggests users are sensitive to such downtime, although the company’s service level agreement allows for about nine hours a year of service downtime.

Shares of Google fell $2.04, or 0.52%, to $387.50 in Thursday trading.